8/8/2019 2007-03-10, Oz - Broderick Review of Stenger - Two Books

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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21334644-5003900,00.html

God: The Failed Hypothesis / The Comprehensible Cosmos

Damien BRODERICKThe Australian, 10 March 2007

God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist , Victor J. Stenger, Prometheus Books, 294pp, $57.95The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From?, Victor J. Stenger, Prometheus Books, 340pp, $56.95

Do we live in an age of resurgent belief, as the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the US and of Islam elsewhere suggests? Or is the "faith of our fathers getting corroded, as

many believers suspect with dismay, by an unholy blend of sceptical science and consumerist self-indulgence? The popularity ofThe Da Vinci Code and Philip PULLMANs

death-of-God trilogy for young readers, His Dark Materials, is certainly striking. Film stars (CRUISE, TRAVOLTA, etc) enthusiastically endorse a cult claiming that a galactic

overlord named Xenu stranded us here 75million years ago.

Meanwhile, defiantly atheistic books have been bestsellers: evolutionist Richard DAWKINSsThe God Delusion, philosopher Dan DENNETTs Breaking the Spell:Religion as a Natural Phenomenon and Sam HARRISs brilliantly incisive little tract, Letter to a Christian Nation. Then there are the claims by filmmakerJames

CAMERON that the tomb of Jesus has been found. What in heavens name is going on?

I have a sneaking suspicion that doubts about faiths are fuelled less by the shock of Darwinian insight, say, than by a deep, unconscious revulsion after 19 ardent true believersmurdered nearly 3000 people on September 11, 2001. Detesting militant Islam required no great intellectual courage on the part of Westerners, but a side effect has been a

dawning sense that if one leading faith could propel such brutality - could constitute, indeed, the new post-communist threat - then perhaps religious conviction in general might bequestionable.

Traditionally, brand-name religion is instilled from infancy, often with ferocious warnings against heretics and infidels, making it hard to doubt the precepts with which one has

grown up. When I was a child in a parochial school, I parroted a catechism that explained vacuously We cannot see God because he is a Spirit, and cannot be seen by us in thislife. Later, I learned classic proofs for Gods existence such as the argument from design (the world is complex and so must have a watchmaker), which the proven process of

evolution had long ago dispelled.

Other arguments seemed, eventually, equally frail. The First Mover gambit was amusingly parodied by a friends phrase: If theres no God, who pulls up the next Kleenex?One last-resort argument for the necessity of the divine was a real puzzler, though: Why is there Something, rather than Nothing? Who put the bang in the big bang? Veteran

particle physicist Victor STENGERoffers an answer to that deep question in his two new books, arguing a materialist, God-free account of the cosmos, equally antagonistic tosuperstition, the paranormal and religions archetypal and newfangled alike. He refuses to accept the polite accommodation urged by agnostic Stephen Jay GOULD that

science and religion can never be in conflict as they are non-overlapping magisterial. Faith, forGOULD, dealt with morals, science with testable fact.

This bid for mutual tolerance gained little traction in either camp. Evolutionary psychology pressed hard against the territorial prerogatives of religion, showing how traditionalethical codes had developed on the basis of templates selected - for good and ill - by a million years of human prehistory. But arent the central dogmas of Christian civilisation,

indeed of all the Abrahamic societies including Judaism and Islam, derived from the infallible word of God delivered in Scripture? STENGERoffers a familiar corrective: themoral guidance of the Bible is confused and often reprehensible, supporting slavery and other atrocities . We interpret its words according to todays superior moral insightand sensitivity, so the interpretations given by Christians must depend on ideals that they have already developed from some other source . Unlike some critics of faith,STENGERtakes the tough line that deity is not just an unnecessary hypothesis or one where an honest thinker can choose to accept or reject it. No, it is the failed hypothesis.

This is a bold claim indeed and certain to meet scornful rejection from prelates and pious alike. Undaunted, STENGER trots briskly through all the obvious claims and his

objections to them, concluding in each case that the evidence for the traditional God is too weak to accept, or can be dismissed as mistaken.

For example, while human life is well-suited to this planet (inevitably, since we evolved here), the universe as a whole is an uncongenial place, vast, empty and hostile. Far frombeing carefully designed and calibrated for humankind, the cosmos looks precisely the sort of place one would expect had it emerged unplanned from the void. That assertion still

seems to most non-scientists merely a conjuring trick. How can something burst into existence from nothing? Philosophers debated this for centuries but the question assumesthat nothing has a clear meaning. Actually, we never see nothing, only the change of one thing into another, the slow dispersal of energy into exhaustion.

As STENGERpoints out in his remarkable bookThe Comprehensible Cosmos, all the matter and energy in the universe, including the newly discovered dark matter and dark

energy that comprise most of the cosmos, balances out to zero. Nothing, as physics Nobel laureate Frank WILCZEKput it, is unstable. The void cannot be conceived asultimately empty. The astonishing random event that led to an explosion of matter and energy and expanding space time - to the creation of a local universe - seems finally within

our mental grasp.

STENGERdoes not stint in his treatment of these remarkable ideas. The first half of his book sets out for any reader with a basic scientific training the way in which symmetrygives rise to the laws of nature: conservation of energy and momentum, the quantum rules that rewrote physics in the 20th century, special and general relativity. His lucid if

demanding treatment offers a somewhat contentious account of the way in which everything we see about us takes the form it does because of one simple demand: that no

standpoint is privileged over another.

This does not mean, as he takes pains to stress, that anything goes in the postmodern vein. Readers prepared to follow his argument into elementary calculus and quantum theorywill find it spelled out in detail in the second half of the book. The tragedy of the 21st century is that so few people have been equipped by the education system to take that

journey into hard-won insight.1 Which is probably one reason, when the pain and confusion of life become too great to bear, so many of us turn to Xenu or God and abandon

the struggle to understand.

Damien BRODERICKs K-Machines won the 2006 Aurealis science fiction award for best novel.

1Comment by Colin KLINE:

It is always very easy to lament and deplore modern standards of education. But this is no new matter to carp about the same hymn is sung by each

senior generation that nostalgically looks backward. Factually, each new generation is able (but may not wish) to learn vast amounts of new (andserious) material not available to earlier schoolrooms. Is there any merit in the claim that THIS modern generation is lacking in the mathematical rigour

of their seniors? Probably not. Only the elite, of ANY generation, conquered the heights of most disciplines. The rest? They were once hewers of

wood & drawers of water, and probably still are, but now become accountants, bureaucrats, politicians and spin-doctors

So in regard to BRODERICKS tragedy here, and STENGERs elementary calculus and quantum theory, watch out. Youll need at least a modernM.Sc in Physics to be able to digest what STENGER very densely writes in his excellent 2 nd half summary. This is no fault of STENGER, for it

behooves us all to lift our game and become educated enough to understand great ideas, whatever their origin.

Thus, one could opine, no one on this planet should be permitted to hold, or expound, any view on religion without suitable higher qualifications.

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